I watched the first half-dozen episodes of H&CF and I was really quite underwhelmed. It was so full of cliches, from the âdriven visionaryâ Joe MacMillen to the punk rock geek Mary Stuart Masterson wannabe Cameron Howe, the characters are just unbelievable and maybe even just a little misogynistic (not in a Mad Men kinda way, pointing out how sexist the 80âs were, but actually misogynistic). The plot points are equally over-the-top, from one OS deleting power-surge disaster to the overheating RAM chip next. I am a big fan of Lee Pace from back in the Pushing Daisies days, and I had a huge crush on Mary Stuart Masterson, but I couldnât stomach this show.
Maybe my expectations were too high for this show. I thought it would be right up my alley - I love the early PC-era setting. All the technical aspects of the show are great, too. The production is great, the mise en scene is fantastic, I even love the opening sequence and the music used in the show.
But, the end product just left me cold. The show just isnât very good.
Those are pretty much my thoughts exactly. Additionally it seemed unmoored from history in that the story started with an alternate reality version of the cloning of the PC BIOS, but by the time that happened the personal computer revolution was already years established*, yet the show seemingly treats that event as the beginning. Nor does it very accurately capture the feeling of those days, and I was there, albeit on the opposite coast. I could accept all that though if it werenât for the fact that the characters just werenât very likable. Mad Menâs characters were all deeply flawed, and committed despicable acts, but at their core we could identify with the characters and come to like them despite their faults.
*There was even a PBS show about the computer business which debuted in the same year the PC BIOS was cloned â Computer Chronicles with Stuary Chiffet and Gary Kildall (the creator of CP/M) as hosts. This is also the year that the film War Games was released. Personal computers were already part of the popular cultural awareness.
The show doesnât need more character at its heart as much as it needs better writing in its scripts.
Completely agree (even so far as being a Pace fan from Pushing Daisies). I was around during the tech boom of the early 80âs in Texas and the show completely failed to capture the zeitgeist. I looked forward to it for weeks and was completely disengaged after about 3 episodes.
I watched all of Season One. I treated it as a sort of somewhat-plausible alternate history, one where events that occurred in many places and over a wider span of time happened in one company.
What actually happened would have been better served with a documentary series. Most of the people involved with the genesis of the Altair, the Apple II, and so on are still alive, or wrote a lot about it.
Wasnât that done already with TRIUMPH OF THE NERDS?
You know, I recall seeing that . . . but donât remember a thing about it.
My brother, who has a collection of ancient PCs, watched this show. He told me that itâs fine as long as you turn down the volume so you canât hear the inane technical prose.
Definitely recommended, Triumph of the Nerds was a Robert X. Cringely jam and he is legit.
I believe I wrote about it at one point
http://blog.codinghorror.com/growing-up-with-the-microcomputer/
I kinda like it. My perspective on a show like this is that itâs sort of inspired by reality, but not a documentary, so the dumb stuff doesnât bother me. When I want to see a realistic portrayal of life in tech I watch The IT CrowdâŚ
Iâm on the fence about the show myself, but even within its framework it never was claiming to be about the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s but the PC-clone story of the 1980s (maybe less exciting but important to the business world and later everybody as these days basically every computer is a PC-clone â even Intel-based Macs). The first season was set in 1981-1982*, which was when the first PC-clone (the Columbia MPC 1600) was released.
*Although the final episode may have been 1983, as they saw a prototype Mac.
Yeah, we watched the whole season, and we donât know why. They did try to make the period look, but there was a lot of stuff they just got weirdly wrong. The characters were mostly unlikeable, the dialog was mostly bad [admittedly, many tv shows have survived that]. If they fired all the writers and directors from the first season, maybe that would help, but probably not that much. The ratings on the first season were pretty dismal, Iâm amazed they picked it up. Unless it did well on Netflix.
As I recall the HCF instruction was in early Motorola 68000s. The bad opcode turned on one lot of bus drivers to 1 and the other lot to 0, causing a large current that often split the epoxy casing of the CPU and could in some cases result in ignition (early 555 timers could do the same thing if the short current wasnât limited.)
It put me off enough that when we started using the 68k series we always bought ceramic cased. But that bug never resurfaced.
Just out of idle curiosity, does the show trace some of its inspiration to Tracy Kidderâs âThe Soul of a New Machineâ?
It has been ages since I read that book, but I think there was some influence there.
Iâm certain I watched that, but it has been such a long time!
Iâve read and enjoyed Cringelyâs books and columns.
{Checks bookshelves}
After a couple of moves I still have Accidental Empires. It has a PostIt note in it from a co-worker Iâd lent it to back in . . . 1992?
Harumph.
They didnât have those type of aluminum automatic garage doors in Silicon Valley suburban homes in the â70sâŚ
I stopped watching at episode 3 as well. No sense of humour from the programmers at all and a ridiculous under showing of how much work needs to be done to actually code something. As said before, itâs not important of it was well written, but it isnât. Iâll have a look at the new series, but itâs probably just more boring people doing stuff miserably.
